Meditation Can Also Have Potential Side Effects
You sit down to meditate. Eyes closed. Breath on the cushion of the lower lip. The teacher's voice on the app says to notice what arises.
What arises is not what was expected. Not bliss, not joy, not calm.
A pulse of fear. A flicker of dissociation, like watching yourself from a corner of the ceiling. A wave of anxiety that has no story attached to it. You open your eyes. Get up. Tell yourself you must be doing it wrong.
Not so. You are running into something the field has only recently been willing to discuss in public.
The research
Willoughby Britton is a clinical neuroscientist at Brown University. She began as a meditation enthusiast and became a researcher of meditation-related difficulties because too many practitioners kept arriving at her door in distress.
With Jared Lindahl she has spent more than a decade documenting what they call the Varieties of Contemplative Experience. Their work catalogues fifty-nine categories of meditation-related experiences that can become difficult or impairing. These are not exotic. Hyperarousal. Panic. Insomnia. Dissociation. A loss of the felt sense of being inside one's own body. Changes to the basic sense of self.
Her organisation, Cheetah House, offers continuing education accredited by the American Psychological Association. David Treleaven's Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness has a workbook follow-up out from W. W. Norton. The conversation has moved from blog posts to clinician training.
Why typical mindfulness instruction misses this
Most beginner teaching assumes the practice is universally safe. Sit. Watch the breath. Return when the mind wanders. Nothing can go wrong.
For someone with a history of trauma, that instruction can have the opposite of its intended effect. Sustained attention turned inward, without preparation or support, can re-open what the nervous system has been carefully holding shut. The body was avoiding mindfulness for a reason.
The Western translation of mindfulness stripped out almost everything that surrounded the practice in its ancient settings. A teacher who knew you had a co-regulating presence. A schedule. Community. Sleep. Food. Rituals that bracketed the practice. Other practices that came first. These traditions built that support because they knew, from centuries of experience, that sustained inward attention without support could undo a person.
The app does not know your history. The eight-week course does not screen for trauma. The workplace mindfulness session has no follow-up. You are left to deal with whatever arises on your own.
What practitioners are starting to notice
I have looked at my own experiences and spoken to enough people now to see a pattern.
Someone tries meditation. Likes it for a while. Then notices something: a thinning of the world, a strange detachment, sleep getting worse instead of better, a sense that emotions are coming through louder than they can manage. They tell a meditation teacher, if they have one. The teacher says, with kindness, that this is part of the path.
Sometimes that is true. Sometimes it is not. Sometimes what is being called "part of the path" is a nervous system that needed slower entry, different practice, or a different teacher altogether.
The work of Britton and Treleaven gives a vocabulary for the difference. Their position is not anti-mindfulness. Both are practitioners. Both teach. Their position is that the meditation practice is more powerful than the popular framing suggests, which means it requires more care and support than the popular way offers.
A few things you can do
Find a teacher trained in trauma-sensitive mindfulness rather than relying on an app on your own.
Ask a teacher to match the practice to your nervous system. Focused attention on a single object asks less than open monitoring. Loving-kindness asks something very different.
Notice the difference between difficulty that deepens you and difficulty that destabilises you.
If you stopped practicing because something felt off, take that seriously.